About Me

What to say ...what to say? I like to read, I like to write, I eat, I sleep, I have a husband and three kids, I write run-on sentences...and abuse "..."s. I enjoy SF/fantasy/horror, wuxia, science, gaming, gardening (badly), and coding.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Happy Apocalypse Day!

Or one of them, at any rate. I've never paid much attention to this particular one (Mayan long count, blah blah blah), but it did remind me that I still need to work on (revise! revise! revise!) my post-apocalyptic NaNo novel from 2008, the one I apparently tagged as "Armageddon". (I think the title is actually "Babylon Remembered" aka "The Babbling Rat", but I can't be sure.) Whatever my views on apocalypses in general, the personal ones are hard to doubt: I have to believe in my own mortality.

So, work on this, work on that, finish this, finish that. It's probably a bad idea to mix the two. The 2008 story was based on the Christian apocalypse (Book of Revelation and all that), whereas the 2012 story is supposedly Buddhist/Taoist. But as I'm an atheist geek, it all comes out weirdly when I fit everything into my own made-up fantasy system (Just because the gods are real doesn't mean you should worship them!).

What to do, what to do... I think I need an intro chapter for the Armageddon novel (if I end it with the "Armageddon Jack" story, I should open it with the "Armageddon Sleeping Beauty" story. The latter of which I haven't written yet. D'oh!) I have the four threads of my still-untitled 2012 novel to follow to the end. I think I can see where they are all going. Wait, no I can't. Four threads? In between typing the previous sentences and this one, I forgot what one of them was. That just shows how all my thoughts are leaking out of my mind!

I'll continue to work on the 2012 NaNo. I hope to finish the first draft in January. I'm taking a break right now for the winter holiday season. I still have some last-minute shopping to do. And I should decide what we want to eat for Christmas. And maybe I can teach my kids to play some holiday music.

I'm soooo sick of that Minuet. (The easy one that's not actually by J. S. Bach. You know. The Minuet.) All three of my kids played it, and the past month, it's been the youngest one's turn. But I did manage to track down the gavotte-that's-not-really-by-Lully-and-not-really-a-gavotte that my son likes, thanks to this awesome website. I was annoyed that the Suzuki books didn't give much info or context on the pieces selected for them, but Mark Polesky tracked everything down and posted it on his website. It's all very well to listen to the included CD for learning how to play, but it seems very sterile (and it's only one version). I prefer to hear the music in a more authentic form. The gavotte (actually a rondeau by Lully's student Marin Marais) sounds completely different when played on period instruments (viola de gambas!) in the period style. Well, ok, my son didn't really care, but I made him listen to it anyway, ha ha ha! (Nothing wrong with his interpretation of the piece, it's just cool to compare different takes on it.)